So for the finale of trash cans and illegal poker….In case you missed the first 2 parts. Here are all the spark notes/key plot points you need to know. And no this story is not an April Fools Joke
1. I’m broker than Mike Tyson post ear biting incident but pre his wonderful cameo in the Hangover.
2. On a Friday night In lieu of my usual 17 year old partying I go to an underground poker room and make 150$..along with my friend Delicious
3. The next day Saturday, Delicious convinces me to take my 150, combine it with his 150 and enter a $300 9 person winner take all tournament. We win and have 2700$ (1350 each). My bank account, wallet, all my assets now add up to 1357
So I leave Delicious house (after our 2700 victory) Saturday and go back to my house. Before I even arrive back at the crib, Delicious calls me and asks me to let it ride a 3rd time. But this time was different. This time the buy in was 2700$ and over 3000 players were playing. The tournament was called the world championship of online poker and we at age 17 would be playing with the best players in the world a year before we were legally allowed to play…… But the thing was we were just as good…if not better.
Well actually not really. These were the best players in the world in their prime; we were just two 17 year old kids who thought they were invincible. But we were pretty good. I started playing poker when I was 15. My dad didn’t allow me to play online poker. So I would go to the library after school and play from 2-4.Play basketball from 4-7. Do various 15 year old things till 11pm. My dad would go to bed at 11 so I’d wake up…and id play poker from 11pm to 4 am. Go to bed at 4 and wake up at 7. From sophomore year to senior year in high school I played nightly and made enough money to pay for everything I needed. However I was always broke because I had to hide it from my dad. I also had to pay for things like clothes, food, bills. Random things most 15 year olds don’t usually pay for. Delicious dropped out of school in the 7th grade and played poker fully to support himself. We were nowhere near as good as the best players in the world but we were the best teenagers around.
There was so much I could of used the 2700$ for and I needed it really badly. But I was barely 17, I was dumb, ambitious, ignorant so I said fuck it lets play. (Not much has changed) Me and Delicious took our 1350 each and signed up for the 2700$ tournament.
The tournament was scheduled to start at 4pm. I played in my basketball game and arrived to Delicious house at 430. The tournament started 30 minutes late and it was perfect timing. We sat in an unlit room in his cold as shit basement of his grandma’s house and started playing online poker. The same thing over 3500 people across the globe were doing that put up 2700$. Except they were probably at nice computers in rooms with heat and not barely of age to get their driver’s license. And so we began playing…a little excited mostly scared as shit that we had so much money on the line. Probably 98% of my net worth-no exaggeration.
But then something funny happened. We forgot. Delicious forgot. I forgot. We forgot that we were playing against the best players in the world. We forgot that we were only 17. We forgot that we had 2700$ and my entire net worth on the line. We forgot that we were in a cold, unlit basement in his grandma’s house. I forgot that I had been forced to play from 11pm-to 4am every night to do the same thing others were able to do at any time. We forgot how much the money meant and how we were just 2 acne faced teenagers barely 17, one who grade wise was close to getting kicked out of public high school and the other never graduated from junior high. We forgot about it all. And we just played…and we played better than either one of us had ever played.
We stepped up and lived in the moment. We were in the zone. This was our one chance and we weren’t going to let it slip away. And so we played and played and played and played….until 6am. Almost 14 hours straight.
At just after 6 am everything I done with poker became validated in one short moment. Playing every night till the wee hours of the morning. Getting only 3 hours of sleep for a year and a half…every night. Reading book after book instead of studying for school. Recording tapes of poker on TV and watching them over and over and over again. Listening to people tell me it was all luck when they had no idea how much time and effort I had put into this craft. Having to listen to my own parents tell me I was a gambling addict. Teachers saying me making money at it was a pipe dream. For a year and a half I had put in over 10,000 hours of learning, playing, studying. Just immersing myself in the art of poker ignoring what everyone else was telling me. And now it had paid off. All the hard work and dedication had led Delicious and I to that one moment and we had captured it.
At 615am we came in 5th place. 5th place made us The #1, and #2 most successful poker players ever in the world under the age of 18. We had made $100,000.
Ya one hundred thousand……..
each.
Next time the aftermath of what happens when you give 2 teenagers 100k each and everyone in a small town finds out about. This story might be crazier than the actual making of the money.
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